I am curious about Marks, Cards, Shelves, Partitioning, Addressing, and other things that might not come to mind immediately.

For Marks and Cards, I have not encountered these terms in software before and I wonder if they have historical significance in some early form of business intelligence, analysis, or data visualization.

Same for Partitioning and Addressing; did Tableau invent this method of defining elements of a calculation or do they have context in prior art?

This question has caused quite a bit of buzz internally at Tableau! Everyone wants to know the answer too and we may be pulling together a little team to "officially" answer this question. In the meantime, Andrew Beers, our VP of Product Development had this to say:

Here's my quick take, best answers I can come up with

"Mark", or "graphical mark", seems to be common terminology in data visualization applications.

"card" is just a general UI term, probably not as common.

"shelves" may be specific to Tableau. If nothing else, this came from the original work done at Stanford.

"partitioning" is borrowed from the "ordered analytics" queries that were added to SQL 99.

"addressing" is probably Tableau local, but influenced by the "order by" clauses of the same "ordered analytics" queries.